Hoot, Toot & Whistle

Sorry the blog hasn't been too active lately - it's the time of the year: the natural light is lousy and the snow creates a colorless, contrastless landscape. So here's something a little different.
This article appears in the current issue of The Cracker Barrel.

All photos courtesy of the Wilmington Historical Society.

How 13 miles of railroad track transformed a town

By Mike Eldred
The Hoosac Tunnel & Wilmington Railroad is fond but distant memory for only a few Wilmington residents. For younger generations and newcomers to the valley the famed local railroad, known affectionately as the "Hoot, Toot, & Whistle," is a legendary piece of Deerfield Valley history.
But the obscure little railroad was almost wholly responsible for bringing the industrial revolution to the Deerfield Valley and changing Wilmington from an isolated farming town into a vital commercial, manufacturing, and tourist center.
The title of a short article published in the New York Times on November 4, 1891, the day before the railroad’s debut trip to the new Wilmington station, sums up the railroad’s anticipated effect on the town: "Wilmington wakes up." According to the article, the Wilmington of the late 1800s was a "Green Mountain backwoods town."

"Old fashioned people with old-fashioned notions have lived and ruled in the town and have clung to the old fashioned customs. There are 1,300 people in Wilmington, and nearly all are descendants of the sixty-seven settlers who founded the village in 1763. There was not a resident of foreign birth in the town until a couple years ago when a few Swedes were brought to cultivate some abandoned hill farms, and no one now living can remember seeing a negro in the town. There is not a brick or stone building in the town."

The Wilmington railroad depot, now a private home.

It’s a fascinating description of a rural town with little direct contact with the rest of the region and few outside influences. "This area was very rural then," says Wilmington historian Peter Morris. "Everything moved by stage coach or buckboard between Brattleboro and Bennington."
Farming was the main economic activity in town, and there were various small cottage industries. But most of the goods produced in Wilmington were consumed within a few miles of their point of origin. Products intended for wider "export," were taken to Brattleboro on what could be a long and treacherous journey. Morris says his father-in-law, Andy Crawford, could remember making the day-long trip to Brattleboro and back by wagon with his father. "It was an all-day trip," Morris says. "You bundled up under a bear-skin blanket and got home after dark."
Goods purchased in Wilmington came in by the same route. It’s often said that people used to "make do" by improvising their own repairs and inventions, but if their ingenuity was part frugality and part poverty, it was also part desperation. Any item that wasn’t already available in town had to be mail-ordered and shipped by rail to the nearest train station, then picked up by horse-drawn wagon. The machinery needed for any large-scale manufacturing business would have been costly and difficult to get over the mountains from Brattleboro to Wilmington

Leaving the station

There were no tourists, and no reason for them to come to Wilmington. Although there was a hotel in town, the Vermont House, it wasn’t a "travel destination." While the town’s economy must have been sufficient to sustain the 1,300 descendents of the 67 original settlers,
There’s little doubt that Wilmington residents looked forward to the economic benefits a railroad would bring. In January 1883, Wilmington voters overwhelmingly authorized the investment of $43,000 in public funds in a "Brattleboro and Bennington Railroad" that would have also served Wilmington. The east-west rail route was never built, but another railroad, the Deerfield Valley Railroad, was built connecting the southern Vermont mountain town of Readsboro to the large manufacturing center of North Adams, MA and points east and west via the Hoosac Tunnel railroad station.
The 11-mile Deerfield River Railroad was completed in 1885. The purpose of the privately owned railroad was to provide hungry Massachusetts factories with the Deerfield Valley’s most abundant raw material: lumber and pulpwood. "
But the railroad also brought an economic boom to the Deerfield River towns. With regular railroad service to bring supplies and equipment in, and finished goods out, it was economically feasible to build factories outside of large cities, closer to the source of the raw materials. Soon, Readsboro boasted a number of industrial facilities, from sawmills and pulpwood processing plants to box and furniture factories.

Wating for the train to come in

Towns along the railroad became affluent communities with better access to goods and services on their own Main Streets, as well as passenger access to North Adams.
Wilmington residents must have watched Readsboro’s good fortunes with envy. When the track was extended another 13 miles to Wilmington in 1891, it was an invitation to the ‘backwoods" town to join the industrial revolution.
The invitation was accepted. The railroad’s chief purpose was still transport logs. According to George Cook, a railroad historian who has been researching the Hoot, Toot & Whistle in its various incarnations, whereas the line to Readsboro was built to feed industry in Massachusetts, the Wilmington extension was built to supply raw materials to new factories in Readsboro. "There was a paper factory in Readsboro that needed to be fed pulpwood," Cook says, "so it sponsored the construction of the railroad."
The ownership and names of the various railroad companies is somewhat convoluted. The "Hoosac Tunnel & Wilmington Railroad existed long before the track to Wilmington was ever laid. The track from the state line to Readsboro was owned privately under another name, and leased to the HT&W. At the completion of the Wilmington line, the three entities merged to become a single HT&W.

But it wasn’t long before industrialization came to Wilmington. The first major construction was a complex of sawmills and other lumber processing operations known as "Mountain Mills." Part village and part factory town, Mountain Mills drew employees from around the valley. But the demand for labor was high enough that foreign workers were also brought in. "The Newton Brothers (of Massachusetts) built the mills in Readsboro, and they had controlling interest in the entire operation," Cook says. "In 1905 they sold it off to Amos Brandin and Martin Brown."
Up until that time, the river was dammed up below Mountain Mills and logs were floated down to the sawmills. Brandin and Brown built a second railroad, the Deerfield River Railroad, from Mountain Mills into Somerset, some 35 miles of track used only to bring logs out of Somerset to feed the growing operation at Mountain Mills. "The railroad also allowed them to bring hardwood out – hardwood doesn’t float," Cook explains. "The mill was rebuilt to handle hardwood."
In 1918, a pulp mill was built at Mountain Mills, and the pulpwood that came out of Somerset was used even closer to home. "They used a sulfite process," Cook says. "Everyone in town knew when the paper mill was running because of the smell, like rotten eggs."

Approaching Wilmington

By 1924, the pulp mill was discontinued and the shores of Harriman Reservoir were lapping at its foundation. "Four quite a few years you could see the smoke stack," Cook says. "The water level came up so fast during a rainstorm in April 1924 that some people were caught with their cars in their garages and still in their homes."
In Wilmington Village, the new economic activity was creating affluence. The train may have come to take away logs, but it brought in new opportunities. After the completion of the railroad terminus in 1891 and 1905, Wilmington became a tourist destination. Large hotels were built catering to affluent urbanites looking for an escape from the summer heat of the city, and a return to the rural enjoyments of their childhood. Raponda Hotel was the first "lakefront" resort in town, built on a peninsula of land that juts out into the lake. The Forest and Stream Club, located in the Chimney Hill area provided fishing and other outdoor recreation opportunities. The Vermont House added a "tea room" to serve the new visitors to town. The Crafts Inn, one of Wilmington’s architectural crown jewels, was designed in 1896 by the famed firm of McKim, Meade, & White, of New York. The inn was completed in 1902.

Luddington Factory, now the site of the DVTA MooVer's headquarters

There’s no doubt that many of the town’s former "cottage industries" grew to take advantage not only of the availability of materials coming in by rail, but also of a new ability to distribute to far away locations with nothing more than at trip to the train station.
In 1914, some of the hardwood and softwood logs coming out of Somerset were diverted to Wilmington, where they were turned into clothespins, spindles, and plywood trays at the newly-built Ludington Woodenware Company factory. Portions of the factory still stand, as part of the former barnboard factory on Mill Street. The Ludington factory sat right next to the railroad tracks.
According to a 1914 newspaper article announcing the completion of the factory, the plant was designed to turn out an incredible 604,800 clothespins in a single day. The factory also produced 400,000 plywood trays per day. The trays were used in the delivery and sale of butter, lard, and "other commodities" at grocery stores. Large yarn bobbins, used in woolen mills, were also produced at the plant.
The new woodenware factory provided 128 jobs in the small town of Wilmington, instantly becoming the town’s largest employer.

Vermont House

For the average household, the train brought in foods and goods that weren’t available otherwise. The first banana, or orange, ever seen in the town of Wilmington probably came in on a rail car. But the train also brought a better standard of living. "Think about how you kept your house warm," Cook says. "Before the train, there was no coal, and wood was starting to get scarce. Coal was a big item."
Mail, medicines, specialty goods – nearly all the earmarks of a growing modern and affluent lifestyle depended on the train. "And if the snow blocked the train from getting through, there was real concern," Cook says. "There were times when people were hurting because the coal didn’t come in."

The HT&W continued to serve the community for more than 45 years. But the rise of the automobile, along with improvements in the roads, robbed the railroad of its preeminence as the town’s connection to the rest of the world. A series of natural disasters led to the discontinuation of the track from Readsboro to Wilmington. The railroad company considered discontinuing the track when the reservoir was flooded, but the town convinced the company to build a trestle crossing the lake. In November 1927, the trestle was washed out in a hurricane. While the trestle was under reconstruction, goods were transferred by truck from train’s northernmost passage, and passengers were taken into town by car.
According to a news clipping on file at the Wilmington Historical Society, the train didn’t return to Wilmington until July 8, 1929. The town was so excited at the prospect of renewing its connection with the outside world, the locomotive returned to town with cacophony of factory whistles, train whistles, and fire sirens.

Childs Tavern Porch, now the Crafts Inn

But in 1936 another hurricane struck, this time leaving the trestle and much of the track between Wilmington and Readsboro in ruins. Instead of rebuilding, the track between Wilmington and Readsboro was removed for good. The truncated HT&W continued to serve the valley until 1971, when service between the Hoosac Tunnel station and Readsboro was discontinued.

Raponda Hotel